New search engines are trying to do for podcasting what Technorati did for blogs, writes Wired, quoting Gary Price, news editor of Search Engine Watch, as saying "the spoken word is now becoming as searchable as the printed word has always been." Two such engines, Podzinger and blinkx, search audio content by translating the entire audio into text and creating an index for searching, rather than relying on a podcast's metadata.

Podscope, another engine, launched last spring by TVEyes, searches podcasts by scanning for the sounds of syllables rather than full words. AOL is integrating Podscope into its search page.

Podzinger, in beta, lets users go directly to the spot in a podcast where the search term appears, and podcasters can link to a searchable index of their content to sell sponsored links to text in the index provided by Podzinger.

The engine is based on speech-recognition software that BBN Technologies, based in Massachusetts, created for U.S. intelligence agencies to help analysts translate and search foreign broadcasts and other media to identify topics and speakers.